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Tag: license

Had an interesting problem this last week that I thought I would share on the blog in case anybody else runs into the issue. It took a few days, building a new server from scratch, and rolling back hot fixes to finally figure out what was going on.

A little back history, the LANDesk server (version 8.5) was installed by some consultants so we didn’t really have any info on the install. Our support plan ran out a couple years ago, and the person in charge with talking with the consultants is no longer here. We were not able to upgrade to the latest version of the product without paying a price for it. Anyways, it has been running fine for the last 3-4 years, not major problems or issues other than the occasional reboot and applying of hot fixes or patches. We just installed a Blackberry Enterprise Server on here as well since it was not really doing that much work, the two were coexisting fine for about a month before the problems cropped up.

About a month ago (unknown to us), the LANDesk server was not importing new inventories of machines in the server (and who knows what else), no significant errors were cropping up in the event logs. Our desktop support guy came by and mentioned it one day in passing, so I thought I would check it out. At first when I looked at it, I saw we were over the limit for our licensed devices. He cleaned out a bunch and just left it at that, thinking we were over our limit thus creating the errors. That didn’t fix the issue. So I started to scour the event logs a little deeper and finally found these nuggets of information in the Application Log:

After searching around on the LANDesk support site and googling about every combination of the above errors I could, I was coming up with a blank. The closest thing I could find was that there was a communication problem with the database (SQL Server 2000), but I was able to do queries and such as much as I wanted to. Some other articles were pointing to the fact that our licensing could not get updated properly, so we should reactive the licenses on the core server. I did, but to no avail.

So, I fired up and created a VMWare server thinking we would have to rebuild from scratch (not too big of deal except for licensing problems), but after I spent about 4 hours loading LANDesk (had to find a Windows NT Server and Windows 98 disc as well!), SQL Server 2000 all running on top of Windows 2003 R2 Standard Server. After the final reboot after the installing of LANDesk, I got the same exact error messages as above! That was actually very encouraging now. That told me it had something to do with one of the hot fixes or updates we have applied onto the server. I tracked back all of the updates that were done to Windows during the timeframe when things broke, and saw that we (or I) did a .NET 2.0 install and update around this time. So, did a google on LANDesk 8.5 and .NET 2.0, and my first hit was this link, explaining that you can not have .NET 2.0 installed on the same server as LANDesk 8.5. Also, fortunately there were instruction on what to do to uninstall the .NET 2.0 framework and re-register the .NET 1.1 framework which it needs. For those that who don’t want to browse to it, here is the commands:

Steps to remove and register .NET Framework

To remove Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, run the following command:
C:\windows\Microsoft.NET\framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe /u

To reinstall Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1, run the following command:
C:\windows\Microsoft.NET\framework\1.1.4322\aspnet_regiis.exe /i

I also did an uninstall of the .NET 2.0 Framework with SP1 in the add/remove programs. After all of that, I did a reboot as well, even though it didn’t ask for it.

So far, things look like they were, happy as could be. Just wished I found the problem and possible soultions via the forums, I am sure I was not the first to encounter this problem. Hope this helps anybody who runs into the same issue.